PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Arvind Ganesh

Also known as Arvind Ganesh Balasubramanian

Arvind Ganesh is a computer vision researcher whose work spans face recognition, low-rank matrix recovery, and machine learning systems. He earned electrical engineering degrees at IIT Madras and a Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering at the University of Illinois, where he studied low-rank matrix recovery with advisor Yi Ma. He coauthored research on principal component pursuit and face recognition, worked at IBM Research, and joined video-search startup Baarzo before Google acquired it. At Google, he built personal video-search features, image-ranking and moderation pipelines, and multimodal models for ad creative; at Uber, he led enterprise search and LLM productivity work. He is an engineering manager at Roblox, where he leads ranking and personalization for the Avatar Marketplace.

Now at
Roblox
Works
37
Citations
15,422
h-index
22
Badges

Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 22 October 2026.

Timeline

  1. 2001–2012

    IIT Madras and Illinois

    From 2001 to 2006, he earns B.Tech and M.Tech degrees in electrical engineering at IIT Madras. He completes a Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in 2012, with advisor Yi Ma and research on low-rank matrix recovery for computer vision.

  2. 2010–2012

    Principal component pursuit

    In 2010, he coauthors Dense Error Correction for Low-Rank Matrices via Principal Component Pursuit, which studies recovery of low-rank matrices with arbitrarily corrupted entries. In 2012, he coauthors Principal Component Pursuit with Reduced Linear Measurements, which analyzes recovery from a small set of linear measurements.

  3. 2011

    Face recognition research

    He coauthors the 2011 report Sparsity and Robustness in Face Recognition with John Wright, Allen Yang, Zihan Zhou, and Yi Ma.

  4. 2012–2013

    Research at IBM

    From 2012 to 2013, he works as a research scientist at IBM Research. His work on data clustering and imputation with partial information supports a tool for customer-care representatives resolving customer issues.

  5. 2013–2014

    Founding ML engineer at Baarzo

    In 2013, he joins video-search startup Baarzo as a founding ML engineer; Google acquires the startup in 2014.

  6. 2014–2024

    Search and ML at Google

    From 2014 to 2024, he works as a software engineer and tech lead at Google. He builds personal video search and the Action Moments GIF feature for Google Photos, plus ML pipelines for ranking and moderating user-uploaded imagery on Google Maps. He develops multimodal models to assess ad creative quality.

  7. 2024–2025

    Enterprise search at Uber

    From 2024 to 2025, he serves as a tech lead manager at Uber, building enterprise search and LLM-powered productivity tools.

  8. Since January 2026

    Avatar Marketplace ranking

    In January 2026, he becomes an engineering manager at Roblox and leads ranking and personalization for the Avatar Marketplace.

Career

  1. Since 2026RobloxEngineering manager
  2. 2024–2025UberTech lead manager
  3. 2018–2022PSG College of Arts & Science
  4. 2014–2024GoogleSoftware engineer and tech lead
  5. 2013–2014BaarzoFounding ML engineer
  6. 2012–2013IBM ResearchResearch scientist

Education

  1. 2012University of Illinois Urbana-ChampaignPh.D.
  2. 2006IIT MadrasB.Tech and M.Tech

From the biography and OpenAlex affiliations (the years of papers that list the organization), so some years are approximate.

  1. Of 943 people shaping AI who worked at Google, 446 work there nowIncludes Arvind Ganesh. Our estimates of where the 943 people shaping AI who worked at Google and Google DeepMind work now: 446 at Google and 452 across 278 other organizations.
  2. Google had the most people shaping AI every year from 2014 to 2025Includes Google. Our estimates of which organizations employed the most people shaping AI each year from 1955 to 2025, tracing the shift from university labs to companies.
  3. Google has the highest combined h-index among AI organizationsIncludes Google. We estimate that Google holds the highest combined h-index at 8,016, while universities account for 73% of the deduplicated total across AI organizations.
  4. 20% of people at companies who shape AI also hold a university role, led by Google and Stanford UniversityIncludes Google. We estimate that 539 of the 6,766 people with a known current organization (8%) hold both a university role and a company role, including 20% of people at companies and 13% of people at universities.

Colleagues

People named in this biography, and people with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of Arvind Ganesh yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. Arvind Ganesh Balasubramanian — Engineering Manager & ML Researcher aganba.github.io. Checked 20 October 2026.
  2. Students ai.hku.hk. Checked 20 October 2026.
  3. [1001.2362] Dense Error Correction for Low-Rank Matrices via Principal Component Pursuit arxiv.org. Checked 20 October 2026.
  4. Principal Component Pursuit with reduced linear measurements for ISIT 2012 - IBM Research research.ibm.com. Checked 20 October 2026.
  5. [1111.1014] Sparsity and Robustness in Face Recognition arxiv.org. Checked 20 October 2026.